Edition:
Advertisement

Inside Out | Sweet smell of success: Foreign fragrances dominate China’s perfume market

Chaotic recent history accounts for the dearth of Chinese perfume suppliers, allowing leading western fragrance brands to rule the mainland market

Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0
China has 20 per cent of the world’s population, but accounts for just 1 per cent of the US$38.8 billion global perfume market. Photo: AFP

It is a sad reflection on the abysmal quality of my life that most of my non-food shopping seems to be done in airport duty free malls. But at least as one wanders through the predictable branded tedium of the Duty Free Stores, there is normally ample time for people-watching, and random musing.

When I was last in Heathrow’s eerily empty Terminal 5 a particular scene – of a flock of fashionable mainland Chinese women scenting their way through the Jo Malone part of the fragrance section – set me thinking: why, given the emergence of so many fascinating new Chinese consumer brands, from Huawei to Haier, can’t I think of a single China-made perfume? Whatever the progress of Chinese companies in global manufacturing, it seems the leading western fragrance brands rule the China market unchallenged.

This is particularly puzzling because the cynic in me says that when push comes to shove, the fragrance industry is but a snobbish corner of the global chemicals industry – and China’s chemicals industry is among the world’s best and most creative – just look at how imaginatively they used melamine in baby milk formula.

It seems the first, and perhaps most important reason for China’s laggardliness is the country’s recent chaotic history. During the Cultural Revolution years, the use of perfume was literally illegal. Whoever used scents or perfumes before 1967 either suffered torture and humiliation as a poisonous weed, or quickly got rid of any evidence.

By the time the country began to emerge after the overthrow of the Gang of Four, Chinese people had lost the habit. And anyway, during a period of such widespread poverty, perfume was a luxury most were happy to ignore. Whatever perfume industry existed before 1967 evaporated into thin air.

That does not mean China never had a perfume industry. In fact, the country has had thousands of years history of using scents – but most of these were scents burned in incense burners to perfume a room, rather than an individual body. Only the Egyptians seem to have got the perfume habit earlier: as long as 3,500 years ago, the courts of the Pharoahs used perfumes – thought of as the sweat of the sun god Ra.

Market leader is Chanel with a 14 per cent share, while Christian Dior captures 2 per cent of the market and close behind are Lancome and Calvin Klein. Photo: Xinhua
Market leader is Chanel with a 14 per cent share, while Christian Dior captures 2 per cent of the market and close behind are Lancome and Calvin Klein. Photo: Xinhua
Chinese elites and their courtesans also had a habit of carrying bags of scented petals and leaves among their clothes. The most cherished (and expensive) scents seemed to be chenxiang (in English, Agarwood) and floral water (used as much as an insect repellant as a perfume). About 120 years ago, a Shanghai company called Liushen began making a soon-famous scent called Shuang Mei, or Two Sisters, which eventually became popular in the 1930s as far afield as Paris with the brand name Vive. But in the chaos of the 1930s and 1940s Liushen was absorbed by Shanghai Jahwa, the country’s biggest chemicals company, and Shuang Mei disappeared.
Advertisement